C[omp]ute

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Tue, 22 May 2012 18:44:55 -0400

http://buttersafe.com/2008/10/23/the-detour/

Another project draws to a close at work; here at home Lepl is becoming more
of a burden.

I am not a great programmer.  I'm a pretty good programmer, but I keep making
the same stupid mistake: I rely too much on my ability to code my way out of a
hole.  My code becomes bloated, top-heavy and hard to maintain.

At work I have an excuse - faced with unclear requirements I implement all
possible alternatives.  Recently I deleted a slew of code that provided
synthetic data to replace hardware failures (in software to do calibrations of
said hardware).  OK, so that's not quite as crazy as it sounds (I'll spare you
the details), but in retrospect it was wasted work - we aren't calibrating
synthetic data...

But at home?  What is the excuse for Lepl?  I guess it's just fun - piling
concept on top of concept.  Doing lots of stuff.  Carefully balanced code that
can go this way or that.  Dense, dense, dense.

Neutron star dense.  Tending to gravitational collapse.

How do I fix this?  I don't know.  I just sat down and looked at some recent
code.  A new project.  It's already complex.  It does a lot.  How can I make
it do less?  I guess I don't need an embedded web server in a command line
utility.  There was a reason for that.  I guess it wasn't a good enough one.

I need simplicity.  I need to stop coding like a clever man.

Andrew